Digital images, from digital cameras or scanned photographic film, can be viewed, stored, retrieved, and printed using a home computer, or can be uploaded to a website for viewing, as described in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,666,215 to Fredlund et al. Using a web browser, a group of these digital images can be viewed and selected for printing, or it can be sent electronically to other family members and/or friends.
Currently, the usage of the Internet or personal computers and printing devices for picture printing, sharing and storage is growing. Customers create large personal databases of images on the computers and web servers. It is becoming increasingly important to classify or catalog images for subsequent use. Images can be organized into categories according to the people, places, subjects or events depicted, as described in a paper entitled “FotoFile: A Consumer Multimedia Organization and Retrieval System” by Kuchinsky et al. This paper describes such categories or attributes that are used to tag certain images, including a “favorite” attribute that is loosely defined as referring to the “best” images in a user's collection. Classifying images based on user's preference toward favorite images helps to quickly retrieve and share those valuable images. In this paper, the “favorite” attribute could only be used to mark and retrieve specific user's images on their home PC, since there is nothing in the “favorite” attribute designating which user has indicated that this is a “favorite” image. Moreover, this attribute, as it is suggested by Kuchinsky et al., does not allow any systematic differentiation with respect to the degree of preference within the images already marked as favorite images. As a result, after a certain time of acquiring images in the user's PC database, the number of favorite images becomes too large to serve the purpose of the favorite attribute, unless the user will change the attribute for every image in his or her database, which is a lengthy and tiresome process. In addition, the concept of the “best” image does not necessarily refer to a user's emotional reaction.
Consequently, a need exists for an improved method for recording and interpreting the user's emotional reaction to an image for subsequent association of this affective information with a corresponding image and a user identifier.
The present invention broadly defines affective information associated with the image to include various types of psychological reactions, such as affective, cognitive, physiological, or behavioral responses that are not found in any previous systems. It refers both to recorded raw signals and their interpretations.